More juicy gossip from Kenneth ‘Climbing’ Rose

When this second volume of diaries begins in 1979, Kenneth Rose is 54 and well established as the author of the Sunday Telegraph social column ‘Albany at Large’. The first volume, published last year, was reckoned by many to be a disappointmaent on account of Rose’s snobbery. This one is better. By now Rose has arrived. The Thatcher years were his glory days.

When he died in 2014 Rose left six million words of journals, which he bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, and the two volumes edited by D.R. Thorpe which have been published amount to roughly half a million words. Rose saw his diary as his legacy. Back in 1988 he recorded: ‘George Weidenfeld is very enthusiastic about eventually publishing the journals I have been keeping.’ Rose appointed a succession of clever young men to be his literary executor, charged with editing his journals, and eventually settled upon his friend, the political biographer Richard Thorpe.

No one would place Rose in the pantheon of great diarists. For one thing, he tells us almost nothing about himself. There is no introspection or confessional, nothing about feeling depressed or what he had for breakfast, and certainly not a hint of sex. Prim and rather prudish, he didn’t approve of those who revealed their private lives. Alan Clark’s diaries he thought ‘trivial, self-serving and dirty-minded’. As for James Lees-Milne, he considered there were ‘too many indiscreet references to Jim’s homosexual adventures’.

The chief problem with the Rose diaries, though, does remain the author’s snobbishness. Not for nothing was he known as ‘Climbing Rose’. The son of a Jewish surgeon in Bradford named Dr Rosenwige, he had risen to the heart of the British establishment via Repton, New College, Oxford and the Welsh Guards in the war.